New ratings shuffle radio numbers

People in the radio business expected the new, high-tech ratings
would pack a wallop. And they sure did.

There's great news for music stations, amazing news for an
oldies station and middling news for talk stations. And, for the
first time, we know how public radio stations are doing,
popularity-wise (not that bad).

Why does all this matter? Because radio stations make choices
about what you hear based on ratings. If a lot of people are
listening, a station can jack up its advertising rates and live
happily ever after. If its ratings are low, a station might decide
to dump its format -- and maybe its personalities -- and try
something else.

Since the beginning of radio, the ratings people have determined
how many people were listening by asking them. In recent years,
Arbitron, the big ratings company, sent out diaries to volunteers
who agreed to write down what they listened to in return for a bit
of cash.

The problem: People forgot what they listened to. Or they got
lazy and didn't fill out their diaries. And in some cases they were
actually corrupt, secretly manipulating their diaries to support a
particular station, maybe because they worked there or knew someone
who did.

The new system, which went into place in San Diego earlier this
year, relies on Personal People Meters. These pagerlike devices
detect hidden audio tones in radio programming and keep track of
what you listen to. It's a bit Big Brother. (Who knows what else
these doohickeys are listening to?) But they're in place, and last
week the ratings for April, May and June became public.

Music stations have got to be thrilled: In many cases, their
ratings skyrocketed. The two stations tied for No. 1. in June among
listeners ages 6 and up -- Top 40 Channel 933 and soul/R&B
Magic 92.5 -- saw their average audience jump by about 30 percent
to 50 percent compared with last winter. Other music stations with
significantly higher ratings include KGB, Star 94.1, Rock 105.3,
100.7 Jack FM,
Sophie@103.7
and
KPRi.

But the belle of the ball was Walrus 105.7, a new oldies
station. (By oldies, I mean mainly music from the '60s and '70s.)
Walrus zoomed to third place in June, more than doubling its share
of the audience since last winter, and was very close to the top
two spots. What this means for the station's financial success
remains to be determined. Advertisers tend to be more interested in
younger listeners, and Walrus listeners are presumably on the older
side. (The Arbitron ratings made public don't break down listeners
into gender or age groups.)

Still, it's a great victory for a format that the radio industry
had declared to be dead. San Diego, in fact, went for years without
an oldies station until Walrus showed up in 2008. Talk stations
didn't do so well. KOGO, which was tied for first place last
winter, slumped to seventh place in June.

Public radio stations were able to get Arbitron radio ratings in
the past, but they weren't included in the reports made public. Now
they are, so we can see how KPBS-FM and jazz station KSDS are
doing. KPBS-FM is in 11th place overall, and its performance is
comparable with that of public radio stations in other big cities.
(A couple of exceptions are Washington, D.C., and the
intellectual's paradise of Minneapolis. Public radio stations in
those cities do better in the ratings than KPBS-FM.)

KSDS, based at San Diego City College, garnered less than 1
percent of the listening audience, but still beat sports station
KLSD and conservative talk station KCBQ.

Other ratings tidbits:

- Alternative-rock station FM 94/9 beat rival 91X, while country
KSON outpaced rival Hot Country 99.3. (KSON's ratings slipped
compared with the winter, but general manager Darrel Goodin says
that's because Arbitron doesn't do a good job of accurately
representing country listeners in the groups it surveys.)

- Lots of out-of-town stations showed up in the ratings for the
first time, garnering teeny-tiny percentages of the listening
audience. Presumably, many of the listeners are in North County,
which more easily receives stations based in L.A. and Orange
County. The newcomers to the ratings include KBIG (an L.A. Top 40
station), KUSC (an L.A. classical music station) and KPFK (an L.A.
public radio station).

Several Spanish-language stations from Mexico also showed up in
the ratings, but most didn't do very well.

- A lot of radio stations went up in the ratings -- gaining
higher shares of the audience -- but only a few went down. I'm
still trying to figure out how this happened.

If you're scoring at home, here's a list of the 10 highest-rated
stations in June and their average percentage of the listening
audience: Channel 933 and Magic 92.5 (5.9), Walrus 105.7 (5.6), KGB
(5.4), KIFM and Star 94.1 (4.7), KOGO and KyXy (4.5), Rock 105.3
(4.3), 100.7 Jack FM (4.1).